


strange ties

by ignitesthestars



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Almost Romance, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 21:19:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9091198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: Leia is four years old when Jyn Erso teaches her how to sew.(Or, a moment between two women who have lost nearly everything, but not quite)





	

Leia is four years old when Jyn Erso teaches her how to sew.

The girl is a little older than her, and a lot more ragged. Leia envies her messy braids, the dirt under her fingernails. Her own head aches from the bun her aunts managed to scrape it back into, and she’s been steadily chipping away at the paint they’d insisted she wear. 

Looking at the sparse countryside of the planet she’s landed on with her father, she suspects this isn’t exactly the diplomatic party her aunts had been led to believe it was. That happens occasionally, when her father is engaging in his Other Work. Afterwards, he’ll kneel down so their faces are level, quietly explain to her that this is their secret. Leia will nod solemnly back and get a kiss on the forehead or a hug for her troubles, before they move on to whatever engagement the Viceroy of Alderaan is supposed to be on.

Leia might only be four years old, but she’s smarter than most children her age. It makes people afraid, sometimes. It makes her father afraid, not of her, but for her. She doesn’t think she’s quite clever enough to know why that is yet.

“Why are you doing that?”

One day, Leia Organa will be a senator and a diplomat herself. Right now, she’s a four year old princess, and she hasn’t quite mastered the art of _not-demanding_. Jyn glances up at her, wide-eyed, before her expression settles into a scowl.

“Because I want to.”

“Yes, but _why?_ It’s boring.”

“You can think it’s boring if you want to.” Her fingers, not quite as small as Leia’s, keep working. Some sort of doll is coming to life between her hands, and for a moment, Leia finds herself fascinated. “ _I’m_ having fun.”

That stumps her, because sewing is ladies’ work, and Leia has never been able to find anything remotely fun about ladies’ work. A new approach is clearly required here; she edges forward, like maybe getting a better view on the situation will help.

The hands still. “What are you doing?”

“Looking.”

“I thought it was boring.”

Leia looks side-long at Jyn. “You said it wasn’t. I want to know why.”

Jyn’s mouth is half-open to say no when she seems to catch something of the sincerity in her statement. Leia has a tendency to be just as vocally about when she _is_ interested in something as when she isn’t.

“ _Fine_.” Jyn gives her an exaggerated sigh, which catches the ear of Galen Erso. Leia notes the way the other girl’s father questions her with his eyes, the bright grin Jyn returns, and identifies more with her in that instant than she has in her entire life with her aunt. “Look at my doll. It didn’t exist until I made it. You don’t think that’s pretty cool?”

Leia has to admit that that is, in fact, pretty cool. So when Jyn starts to show her the needle and the thread and how they come together to make something from not much, Leia finds herself leaning in even closer.

“I like her,” she declares later, as she boards their small shuttle with her father. This one will be abandoned, she suspects, before they return to their much grander ship, marked with the crest of Organa. “Will I get to see her again, Papa?”

He kneels before her so their faces meet, unusually serious. “I’m afraid not.”

Her face falls. “It didn’t go well?”

“Galen Erso decided that being a father and husband was more important to him than being a martyr. I cannot blame him for that.”

It’s years later and lightyears away when Leia gazes up at the stars over Yavin IV and wishes that Bail Organa had made the same choice. It’s selfish and selfless at the same time, and she frankly is out of the emotional energy to do anything other than feel right now. 

She knows the other woman is approaching without tearing her eyes away from the sky. She has all of the intel on Jyn Erso now, knows exactly what became of her after their shuttle pulled away. Sacrifice had left its mark on all of them, in the end.

“You never said you were a princess,” Jyn says, dropping awkwardly to the ground next to her. She’s still recovering from her own efforts at heroism.

“I - _we_ were on a covert recruiting mission. I wasn’t exactly going to wear a tiara.”

“You were four.”

Leia opens her mouth to explain - that Bail had been trying to appeal to Galen as a father, that Leia had been a clever child (too clever), that even at four she would have kept any secret her father asked her to. But a strange sound chokes her throat instead, and if she hadn’t been a princess and a leader, she might have called it a sob.

She doesn’t know this woman. She doesn’t share anything with her other than a moment in time and dead parents, but when Jyn Erso smiles at her, it looks like she’s biting back the same sound around clenched teeth.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Jyn admits. There’s a laugh in her voice, and the depths of despair. “Only that - I’m tying together whatever threads I can find.”

They contain the remnants of two worlds between them.

“Something from not much at all,” Leia agrees, and when she reaches to grip the other woman’s hand, Jyn doesn’t let go.


End file.
